


Keeps Me On the Level

by Fontainebleau



Category: The Magnificent Seven (2016)
Genre: Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 22:33:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8419768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fontainebleau/pseuds/Fontainebleau
Summary: 'And Billy ... keeps me on the level.' But what does that really take?





	

Billy has seen hatred, has tasted and swallowed its bitter juices himself, but he’s never seen a man hate like Goodnight. His hatred consumes him, reduces him to shaking misery and rage. He hates the youth he was, blithely walking away to join a malignant war as though it was a game; he hates the marksman who tallied his kills and built a reputation on the senseless waste of life; he hates the gutless wreck that he thinks he’s become. He hates that he killed and he hates that he can’t kill any more. He hates his weakness and his fear. He hates that he can’t stop hating.

When it’s at its worst, sometimes Billy can help him. Sometimes Goodnight lets him.

Sometimes he can take the pain and make it distant and vague, holding the cigarette to his lips, coaxing him into a hazy dreaming place where time wreaths and coils and settles.

Sometimes he can keep him company as he cauterises it in the burn of whiskey, waiting it out while he slurs and slumps, pulling his boots off and rolling him into bed when oblivion takes him.

Sometimes he can fuck the despair and anger away, driving into him with a brutal passion until thought and reason fail, replaced by the pulse and flame of pure sensation.

And sometimes, though very rarely, he can rock him like a mother with a child, murmuring comfort in words he can’t understand, wrapping him around in gentleness.

But sometimes none of these is enough, and Goodnight fills up so far with fury and hurt that it spills over to poison everything around him; then he hates Billy too, raging cold, _I don’t need you to fight my fights for me, I don’t want your pity, Don’t think I’ll beg you to stay with me_ , over and over in the hopeless hope that saying it will make it true.

Even in the worst times, and there are the worst – the long night spent leaning his head against the wall of the corridor, door locked against him, listening as Goodnight wept, the heartsick hours of searching in a strange town until he finally found him cold and shaking on the riverbank – Billy stands fast to his love. He lets the waves break over him, hearing the pleas at the core of the desperate denials: _I need you. I want you. Stay with me_.

He’s not good with words, but he tries, little by little, to explain to Goodnight what he means to him, how he found fathomless love in a place he never expected, how after years of drifting alien and rootless he has a centre to his life, an embrace that is his home.

And he counts every tiny victory: the times when Goodnight reaches out absently to pass his flask or take a cigarette, Billy his unheeded second self; the times when a touch on his back drains the tension from his shoulders and the lines from his face; the times when he steps forward fearlessly to face down prejudice in his lover’s defence; the nights alone with the fire when memory ceases to be his enemy and he tells stories of his childhood. He counts every one, each nightmare soothed, each hidden caress, each unfeigned smile; the days of ease, the evenings of silent promise and the nights of love.

Goodnight’s still fighting his war, and so is Billy. He knows that you don’t win every battle, and that a defeat isn’t the same as a surrender. He goes on fighting because he believes in his cause, heart and soul, staking his territory foot by foot, and he trusts that one day peace will come.


End file.
